creators rising - social native whitepaper: ho… · as for getting top-tier influencers to promote...

CREATORSRISING:

How the Gig Economy Works for Brands01/ Creatives or Creators?

02/ Creators Rising

03/ Freelance Labor of Love

04/ Creating What They Know Best

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After nearly a century stifled inside of offices, workers and companies are choosing to abandon traditional work in all its forms in favor of the emergent Gig Economy, in which the employer/employee relationship is loosed of its geographic, long-term commitments and lasts for the duration of a single project. In other words, it’s per diem work, but so phenomenally widespread as to warrant its own proper noun. The financial software maker Intuit estimates that 34 percent of the American workforce now participates in the Gig Economy, a staggering number that, if the company’s estimates are right, will double by 2021.

From whence did this new normal come? As with any macroeconomic trend, causes abound. For one, the proliferation of pocket-sized supercomputers connected to the internet turned out to be fantastically efficient at connecting companies with workers around the world. Just as teams comprised of people anywhere on the planet can collaborate with a combination of Dropbox and Skype, the infrastructure of the internet can instantly match customers with suppliers, whether they’re providing a taxi ride, a place to stay, or helping move a sofa into a walk-up apartment.

Diane Mulcahy, a fellow at the Kauffman Foundation who teaches an MBA class at Babson College on the Gig Economy, breaks

it down to four key drivers. First, companies aren’t creating full-time jobs anymore. Second, the full-time arrangement with its attendant costs and contractual rigidity is anathema to companies. Third, job security has died and joined the spirit realm, turning loyalty to one employer into a fatal risk for employees. And lastly but not least of all, “people want to work this way,” Mulcahy says.

Last year, Field Nation and Future Workplace surveyed 959 freelance workers on their opinions of freelancing. According to the report, “Three out of four prefer freelancing to traditional employment, and five out of six cite reasons other than money as satisfaction drivers, including the ability to derive more enjoyment from their work and corporate politics. An overwhelming 74 percent have no intention of going back to work as a full-time employee and intend to stay as a freelancer.”

This rise of freelancers has begun to irreversibly transform nearly every industry. Taxis, once thought to belong securely in the domain of medallion distributors, have been upended by Uber. Hoteliers have trembled at the rise of Airbnb. The creative industry, long in the stranglehold of advertising and marketing agencies, is no exception.

Introduction

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Creatives or Creators?

01


Creatives or Creators?One group seeks creative work within the confines of a full-time job, working for

traditional benefits. The other is an absolute gamechanger for content-hungry brands.

The Gig Economy has been an unmitigated boon for the creator class, not to be confused with the creative class, defined by urbanist Richard Florida as an echelon of cognitive workers that has played a decisive role in the past three decades of urban economic growth. While the creative class pursues new, creative work in traditional settings full-time, the creator class is a subset of the Gig Economy that pursues content creation as much as a pursuit of self-fulfillment as for economic gain.

The two groups are conceptually adjacent, but they’re dichotomous: The creative class is concentrated in dense urban centers, the creator class is dispersed throughout the world. The creative class works 9 to 5, the creator class makes content when it wants. And critically for brands, while the creative class is often inseparable from upper economic classes, the creator class is as racially and economically diverse as the brand’s customers.


The Gig Economy has unshackled these creators from the endless pro formas of agency work. “Usually to work with big brands, you have to go through the entire agency process of pitching and getting their approval,” says Mike Espinosa, a 28-year-old stop-motion animator based in Madrid who began working through Social Native’s platform when he made a stop-motion video for Perrier. “And it just becomes this big process that for me, to do a six-second video for Perrier would have been maybe a month of talking and trying to find emails or talking to agencies.”


Creators Rising

02


Creators RisingWhen working with independent creators, brands bypass the complex approval chain

that big agencies bring, allowing the creators to become an agency of their own.

The benefits cut both ways. The swelling ranks of content makers joining the creator class has provided brands with options beyond the usual bad ones. The explosion of smartphones has unleashed people’s latent creativity—a stay-at-home mom is now a mom with a world class camera and the means to distribute her work. Suddenly, everyone is an artist, and that means everyone is potentially an

alternative option for brands who have learned that aiming directly for Olympus isn’t always the best strategy: one study showed that the $4 million-plus spent on a 30-second Super Bowl spot fails to boost sales 80 percent of the time.

The low cost-to-efficacy ratio of Super Bowl ads carries over to traditional web ads. Aaron Paine, former director of social

http://www.communicus.com/2017/02/03/10-million-minute-80-super-bowl-ads-fail-reveals-communicus/


media and digital strategy at Polaroid parent C+A Global, found that ads using highly engaging social content get click-through rates upwards of five percent on Facebook and three percent on Google, while traditional ads get about one percent.

As for getting top-tier influencers to promote a product to their legion of followers, it can work, but it doesn’t come cheap. A single sponsored Instagram post comes with a $1,000 price tag for every 100,000 followers the influencer has. On YouTube, it’s $2,000 per 100,000 followers.

The creator class has other strengths over the professional influencers. “I think the way Social Native recruits its users is a little more democratic,” says Aaron Able, director of social media and digital content at West Elm.

“You’re not looking at people with millions of followers, so there’s a larger range of diversity within the pool.” As a company whose marketing campaigns are based on local communities, that diversity is critical. “We’re really focused on the local initiative of that new store community,” says Able.

Rather than have out-of-towners descend on, say, Des Moines, West Elm sends out requests to local creators to drive its marketing campaign: be among the first 300 shoppers at the new location to spend $50 or more and get a free Des Moines tote. Three days before the campaign launch, creators are given totes and briefed on photographing their own tote-centric content—holding them, carrying their dogs in them, and whatever other uses they can conjure. And it works. “Looking at reach and engagement levels that Social Native

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“You’re not looking at people with millions of followers, so there’s a larger range of diversity within the pool.”

provides—for the time commitment, it’s significant,” says Able. And because the template works from location to location, it’s highly scalable.

The parameters of that location-based content creation, or geo-targeting, can be tweaked: when the company opened a new store in Fort Worth, it broadened the geographic boundaries to include Dallas in order to get more high-quality content. But when it came time to open a store in Hoboken, NJ, “we wanted to emphasize our local message and only wanted New Jersey content creators. In some cases it’s a hard line, and in other cases it’s a little broader, and we sometimes play with that space.”

Perhaps most importantly, the company has been able to publish content that is authentic in a way that only locals can be.


CREA

TOR ADVICE FOR BRANDS: I’d hope more brands would

continue to take chances on creators who don’t have huge followings. At the end of the day, brands want to work with influencers with a lot of followers, but they’re looking for on-brand and on-target images, and sometimes that can come from unlikely places.

ADVICE FOR CREATORS: I think it’s always important to go with brands and to have integrity and never push something you wouldn’t use. That’s really what translates through your images and through your captions.

Brittany KelleyAge: 28Instagram Followers: 3,789Location: CAPrimary Occupation: Stay-at-home momFavorite Campaign: Barbie

“...have integrity and never push something you woudn’t use.”


Freelance Labor of Love

03


Freelance Labor of LoveCreators take “honest work” to a whole new meaning. When content comes from the heart,

it’s authentic — which means that creators need a personal investment in your brand.

That authenticity hinges on the creators’ own enthusiasm. Unlike agencies, creators have the privilege of saying no to campaigns they don’t identify with—money and notoriety take a back seat. Instead, creators are principally concerned with how

“98 percent of creators agree that ‘genuinely liking the brand or product’ is important when choosing to participate...”

happy they are with their own content and the extent to which they can keep working.

In a mid-year survey of Social Native’s creators, 98 percent agreed that “genuinely liking the brand or product” is important when choosing to participate in a campaign, and 95 percent agreed that the brand’s aesthetic should match their own. Together, they were the top two reasons creators cited when choosing campaigns. Think of an agency that can say the same.


“I review products anyway on Yelp or Facebook or whatever and say, ‘Hey, I loved this,”’ says Brittany Kelley, who has been creating content for Social Native for the past year. “So it’s kind of amazing to have the opportunity on my platform to use that same voice and get paid to do it.”

The ability to create only when they want to say “yes” positions creators as ideal

spokespeople because brands no longer have to approximate their own marketing pastiches of authenticity. Instead, the authenticity is, well, authentic.

In turn, creators publish content that is true to themselves: When asked by Social Native how they measure their own success, creators cited happiness with what they’ve published as the number one

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metric. Which means that even though creators have managed to offer content at a fraction of the costs of agencies and top influencers, what they produce is hardly fly-by-night grist. Eighty-nine percent of creators said they come up with multiple directions for a photo, and 64 percent said that it takes more than 10 shots to capture the perfect photo for a campaign. It’s labor, but a labor of love.

“With stop motion, you have to shoot for maybe six hours, with one finger on the keyboard pressing enter and your other hand surrounded by wood and playdough and a bunch of crazy things around you,” says Espinosa. “Then you have three or four hours of editing depending on the complexity of the video. Sometimes I start working at 10 pm and know I have all night. The best ideas I have come by just grabbing the product and putting it in front of the camera, and I can play around with them any time I want.”


VID

EOG

RAPH

ERADVICE FOR BRANDS: Creative freedom—that’s the big, big point that’s not taken that seriously. Nowadays with content creation, you can post 20 videos a week, and the next week they’ll be forgotten. If you give freedom to the creators, you can make your channel look so much cooler instead of limiting yourself to this tight little box and they all look so similar.

ADVICE TO CREATORS: Just create, a lot, a lot, a lot. The more you do, the better you’re going to get.

Mike EspinosaAge: 29Instagram Followers: 4,899Location: Madrid, SpainPrimary Occupation: VideographerFavorite Campaign: Perrier

“Creative freedom — that’s the big, big point...”


Creating What They Know Best

04


Creating What They Know BestYou wouldn’t hire a figure skater to fix your leaking pipes, nor would you ask a plumber to

execute a flawless triple axel. So when you work with a creator, let them stick to what they know.

Lisa Peyton, global social and immersive media strategist at Intel, used Social Native to complement the company’s campaign focusing on stories of women who started their own businesses after hardships. The content created by Social Native’s users bolstered the content Intel created in house. The in-house videos provided a center of gravity around which the creators could relate and share their individual stories.

West Elm also used Social Native creators for its Local Love campaigns, where residents played tour guide and

highlighted their favorite spots in their cities with the hashtag #westelmLOCAL. “I had been to Denver a lot and knew what the creators were sharing and it made sense,” says Able. In other words, the content wasn’t phony because its creators weren’t phony. “I can appreciate what the influencers are sharing in communities I’m already familiar with.” So can the intended audience.

“The biggest takeaway for me is to make sure what you’re asking these micro-influencers to create is a natural and


simple and straightforward thing for them,” says Able. “Asking food bloggers to take a picture of food or food prep is not a stretch, and it’s going to resonate and be the most relevant to their audience. We’re seeing the most successes when it’s the most natural for that group of people. It still applies our brand or brand message, but the brief is tailored to make it authentic for them.”

And most of the time, that content will be, because creators want to create. In 2016, Upwork and the Freelance Union, a nonprofit that advocates for the denizens of the Gig Economy, asked their members how much money it would take to get them to leave the Gig Economy and return to a regular, full-time job. The answer, for 50 percent of them, was that no price was high enough.


ENTR

EPRE

NEU

R ADVICE TO BRANDS: Don’t be afraid to use the little guys. This is a vastly competitive industry, I’ve found out, but some of the most authentic work comes from those who are striving to get our names out.

ADVICE TO CREATORS: If you really want to do it, just start. When I started creating content, all I had was an iPhone 4. There’s always this stigma you need all this equipment, but you really just need a perspective and a creative eye.

Jillayna HarrisonAge: 28Instagram Followers: 2,816Location: Cincinnati, OhioPrimary Occupation: Stay-at-home momFavorite Campaign: Dr. Jart

“Don’t be afraid to use the little guys.”


A shifting economy has empowered creators of all disciplines to forgo working in-house at a brand or agency in favor of working in their own house. This seismic shift away from traditional work models has freed up capital and creative labor to build a new class of independent creatives. Marketers with content needs now have the opportunity to draw on a diverse community of independent creators who aren’t bound to an agency office or production studio. These new independent creators work from their phones creating content ad hoc in minutes or hours rather than after weeks of meetings. These opportunities, both for marketers and brands, are enabled by a gig economy that has released the potential of a new creative generation.

Conclusion

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creators rising - social native whitepaper: ho… · as for getting top-tier influencers to promote...

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